Sullivan 'gutted' by Mayo ladies defeat

THE further you get in competitions, the tighter the margins get.
In this All-Ireland LGFA senior championship, a mishap against Laois is a disaster against Kerry, Cork, Meath, or Dublin.
A series of mishaps? You ship 1-7 in nine minutes and lose a game before half-time.
“We’re just absolutely gutted, bitterly disappointed,” Mayo captain Kathryn Sullivan told The Mayo News after losing to Kerry in last weekend's All-Ireland semi-final, mirroring her exact words in her appearance and tone of voice. 
“I think we just had a bit too much work to do in the second half after they got a good lead in the first half. I think we pulled back together, we outscored them in the second half. We just made a few silly mistakes. I suppose if you had maybe another two or three minutes I felt we would have been on top.”
Where did it all go wrong in the aforementioned nine-minute period?
“They took their chances. Simple as,” replied Sullivan.
“We were still up in front of the other side in front of goal and didn’t take as much chances in the first half.
“Look, you can blame the wind, you can blame all that, we still came out in the second half and I’m proud of the girls the way they played there.
“We’re gutted. I’m kind of lost for words. We just stick together; we mind each other and we’ll just move on from this in the next couple of days.”
When asked about the future of the team, the 32-year-old acknowledged ‘there are decisions that have to be made now, especially for us senior players’.
However, the Castlebar defender insisted that there is a bright future ahead for Mayo football as a whole, even if the future appears uncertain a few panellists of her vintage.
“You can see the impact the girls made here when they came on,” said Sullivan.
“[There is] a massive future ahead for some of those girls, for the more senior players, I suppose, you just have to get over the next few days and make decisions and the main thing is that we just stick together for the coming week.”
Earlier this summer, the Mitchels woman had the ‘huge honour’ of captaining Mayo to their first Connacht title since 2016.
She wasn’t part of the team that got to the All-Ireland final in 2017, and now she will have to wait at least another year if she is to play in Croker on the biggest day of the year.
“We’ve so many leaders on this team, so I always say I captained them to the title but I’m nothing without the girls around me,” Sullivan said when asked to reflect on her season.
“We finished well in the league. I know it was a rough start. We got that Connacht title back and we reached the All-Ireland semi-final for the third year in a row, but unfortunately we just couldn’t get over the line again.
“Look, they are small little wins but today unfortunately it just wasn’t our day.”